On September 22, 2011 President Obama unveiled a plan that would allow states to opt out of key provisions of the highly unsuccessful No Child Left Behind federal mandate. This has left an opening for something to more effectively unify the nation’s approach to educating its children and adolescents.

The Common Core Standards for College and Career Readiness are a new set of guidelines and expectations to guide instruction towards cumulatively teaching students skills they need to master by the end of high school so they can succeed in college and in their careers. The push for national standards of what students should learn is being funded by the federal Race to the Top grants program, using money as an incentive for states to adopt the criteria.

Because of these new requirements, it will be mandatory to take three course assessments after certain durations of instructional time and an end-of-year assessment administered online. Students will be also required to take revised HSAs reflecting the common core standards.These provisions mainly focus on revising current instruction to be much more in depth instead of so broad. Essentially, the specifications are intended to give students a much better understanding of material to use as a foundation for more rigorous courses to come. In high school mathematics, for example, the standards will pinpoint instruction on applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges, instead of teaching to the test as was the norm for the last decade under No Child Left Behind.

Math teachers here see the potential in this new program. For years, MCPS students have been entering advanced math classes lacking the fundamentals necessary to succeed in that class, resulting in the teacher having to spend class time re-teaching what students should already know. Now, the hope is that the common core standards will not limit but expand the freedom of teachers to choose how and what they teach and not force them to waste time re-teaching.

At Sherwood, the overall approach to curriculum and instruction is already being altered to reflect common core standards and the priority is improving student achievement through a strong, rich curriculum that will center on engaging students in the class based on reading, writing and language skills necessary for the twenty-first century.

Despite the benefits of national common core standards, many questions have risen regarding it. For one, how long can it last? The federal government’s Race to the Top grants could be stopped if President Obama is out of office in 2012. Many believe that states are only implementing the program due to monetary incentives and that many states and school districts will curtail their efforts if funding is cut by a new Republican President.

At the classroom level, students are also worried about the implications regarding their own education. If instruction is being slowed down, where does it leave the few students who are academically ahead of their peers and where does this leave students who learn more slowly than others? The fear is this educational communism may ultimately fail by trying to get everyone, at every school in the nation, to learn at the same pace.

The common core standards also might make students who do not plan on attending college uneasy, because the entire purpose of this program is to prepare students for college and their careers afterwards. Now these students are left wondering if they will be ironically left behind by this new program.

So will these new standards work or are they just a series of educational talking points and buzz words that won’t actually affect anything? Will they jumpstart U.S. education on a path towards success and make a long-lasting impact on American education or will this fail like No Child Left Behind? For now nobody knows and only time will tell. We must wait for the problems to show themselves so they can be corrected and for the positives to emerge so they can be repeated.